Having fun at the Tournnaments?

Chess tournaments =

intense competition,

testing your (latest) mastered skills,

excitement of ratings increase,

rush of tactics,

tiebreaks,

strategy run,

trophies,

prizes,

awards,

 pairings

 etc etc etc and etc.

Do you have fun at the Tournaments?

What kind of fun?

What if you were a player?

What if you are a coach or a parent?

If you are a player, what do you do in between games?

Do you tour places if you are playing a multiday tournament?


Kids have lot of fun at the tournament. See photo below, it is a common sight that kids want to play with chess pieces building towers. It is a joy to watch the kids play chess seriously. It is a joy to watch kids running around at the tournament venue playing with each other. Kids who go to higher ratings miss this kind of fun. As the ratings go higher, they move into adult/ open tournaments where they cannot mingle with kids anymore. That kind of sucks the fun out of their tournaments. It is our responsibility as parents and coaches to find fun for them in multiple ways = take them to movies they like, take them to places like Disneyland for tournaments, bribe them with goodies etc. Ofcourse, these kids with good ratings do deserve bribes. :)) 

Sometimes it does get boring if  the games are scheduled at a specific time instead of asap. Sometimes chess tournaments are outdoor events, especially when they are in summer and when they are at a sports festival. Parents do talk about what is going on with their kids at schools. Coaches talk about the latest, exciting and new rise of talented players. Sometimes players do use chess tournaments as social gatherings, usually at club levels.




Chess is a serious game. But, it all boils down to saying that we should have fun no matter what type of sport we are playing. Have fun irrespective of the results.....!


p.s: What chess piece do you see the above 1st paragraph as? :D

Speed thrills....

 

In the last few months, I lost games that I should draw against; I drew games that I should win. As a result, my USCF rating dropped ~ 200 points. Age catching up? Loss of focus? Worldly problems? I didn't know. For one or two matches, I didn't care so much. Actually any player can lose 200 points from the peak, no big deal. But, the player should know the quality of his game over a period of time.

 

Last week, I was playing a game against a player who was 300 points higher. I was unable to see more than 1 move ahead. I couldn't see any tactics. I very well know that is not who I am.

 

So, I put myself to a test. I opened chesstempo.com, started doing tactics. I don't practice tactics myself regularly. I teach  tactics to students, analyze games but don't do tactics or puzzles as a habit myself. I do tactics occasionally though. When I started doing tactics on chesstempo.com, my rating dropped 250 points one day. I was shocked this time. Dropping points on USCF is one thing, because we can lose games based on many factors. But, chesstempo is another thing. It only involves your thought process to do tactics and nothing else. I looked back on what I was doing wrong....

looked at the big picture.

 

Like everyone else in this world, I am also a slave to my mobile phone. Not so much as everyone else, I think. I don't do texting, nothing. But, when we have a smart phone and we have tools that we can do, we won't sit quiet. Chess.com app, other chess apps made their way into my smart phone in the last few months. So, I started playing 30 min games on chess.com. Then, I started playing 5 min games. I played 100s of them in the last 2 - 3 months. It thrills to play speed chess. We don't waste too much time to finish one game, we don't need to wait for the other person for a long time. And we can play many games in one hour. I didn't give 2nd thought on what I was losing by playing Blitz games.....

 

 

 

If I am not wrong, playing blitz is what has been killing my ability to think properly. Hikaru Nakamura is the king of speed chess (he recently lost those titles as well), but many famous players are of the opinion that speed chess is what is holding Nakamura from becoming World No. 1.

 

So, what is the comparison between Nakamura and me? Nothing much except both of us are chess players. I think speed chess affects players of all levels. World class players to beginners. During speed chess, we don't have the time/ chance to frame and think tactics too much. We just play on our intuition. To be precise, it even kills our tactics skills.

 

Just my honest opinion.

 

So, are there no benefits to playing Blitz games? I think there are!! We want to practice openings. We could do that against a software in a computer. But, if we want to do it against humans, we can do by playing Blitz games. If you want to practice variations in long games against humans, it is possible but takes a long time. Other than this, I don't see much of value in Blitz games. At least to me, my style of game. Other players may have different thoughts, others may see value in Blitz. I respect their opinions......

 

I stopped playing lot of Blitz games immediately. I still do, because I have the craving but I reduced that habit a lot in the last few days. Instead, I am practicing tactics on chesstempo.com  ....We will see how my rating graphs goes....

 

Ciao! 

 

 

 

 

Playing too fast......

I posted here ~ couple of months back that my student broke the USCF 1,000 rating barrier after a plateau. He worked hard in summer session when his school was closed = worked on tactics (on chesstempo.com, polgar puzzles, other popular chess puzzle books...), played practice games with computers, with me,  and with other players = learnt quite a lot. As a result, his ability did improve. As we discussed before, ability does not always reflect in the ratings. But, in this day and age, there are tools to measure performance wisely. Some of the tools are, ofcourse again chesstempo.com tactics rating, chess.com standard rating, games with computer software etc. These tools will roughly provide an estimate of the players' performance even if the player does not play USCF OTB tournaments. So, even without playing USCF tournaments, I can say that his performance did improve a lot. However, he did play USCF tournaments in summer. His rating has risen to USCF 1254 and when the current tournament gets rated, his rating should be close to USCF 1,300. He will be rated in the Top 100 USCF players for his age group when USCF lists the players next time ~ October 1st. Which is quite an achievement for a player who started learning chess only ~ a year back. I expect him to plateau around this level for a while, but let's see. We never know...Sometimes a player's ability is less than OTB rating while at other times the players' perform lower than their ability OTB. Our next goal before his next Birthday is for him to break into the top 50 players for his age group. 

I am rated @ USCF 1,500. Last year around this time, I used to win 80% of the matches between us. Right now, he wins 70% of them. I am finding it to be increasingly difficult to win against my student. I can see the day when he will never let me win, very soon in future.  Now, let's focus on our this blog's title topic from here. 

Select any sport; When a player finds something too easy, he will try to hasten things. Same goes in chess. When the player is not thinking too much, he tends to play fast. When the player is playing fast, mistakes do start to happen. But, didn't I say we solved the problem of playing too fast? Now, our player is playing too fast once again. Ofcourse, at a higher level of game/ tactics. As a result, his  performance (eg: chesstempo) is falling about ~ 25 points lower. I don't just look at the performance. I told my student that irrespective of how higher he goes on the rating graphs, I am also looking at the aspect of him playing slowly. Regardless of the difficulty of the problem, my player is trying to rush solving those puzzles. If we ignore simple mistakes, those mistakes will cause the performance to slow/ drop at some time. Now, we need speed breaks to slow him down. I believe I can apply some tools to slow him down now. All my player needs is space to think. I believe I can apply 2 tools: the first one is checkmates exercise and another is from chessgym (find pieces under attack) which was suggested by  AoxomoxoA wondering as well. I believe these 2 types of exercises will give some challenge to my player and get him to think = slow him down. I plan to let my student do these exercises for 15 mins each in the morning and evening. More on how this works in a few weeks time....